This was new.
This was special.
For she’d finally come in contact with her equal, and he’d imposed on her this delicious intricate patchwork, so dark and so rich that even she had difficulty making a read of it. Addiction? Oh, yes. Sexual compulsion? Not quite, but a close kissing cousin. Her need to complete someone had never been this strong, and she only hoped she could apply in practice what this particular burst of psychic insight had indicated to her just now, like a vision with footnotes, with guidelines, like fate. First, she couldn’t tell anyone. Second, it was a game and she was going to win it. Period. She had to have faith.
Marissa made a right and headed for the cluttered parking area in front of the Court entrance. Faith was a tough sell, a stepchild we were tempted to toss away the first time it fell short of our expectations, and it still haunted her that she’d so recently failed playing gypsy girl, failed big-time and lost the love of her life in the process. But this was America, sweetheart, the land of opportunity, the place where the most revered were the ones who could handle adversity, pick themselves up and brush themselves off, start over, reinvent themselves.
She slowed at the pedestrian crosswalk, turning in left to look for a space.
“So bring it then, dark one,” she thought. “I’ll show you that we’re not all victims with holes to hide in and the dumb obligation to get down and start digging them. Oh, no, honey. It takes two to tango. And I might just be more than you bargained for.”
JEROME
All right, asshole. Enough. We’ll go no further with this, because I know her now. Not like it would make any fucking difference to me that Marissa Madison regularly attended church or set up a program through her high school to feed the homeless up in the North Philadelphia ghetto. That ain’t what I’m talking about, ’cause as far as I’m concerned that’s all bullshit anyway, fancy smoke-shifting, face-paint and accessories. I’ve seen the real girl now, worn her skin, felt the pulse coming up behind her eyes, and I’m telling you, I want out. You want me to go admit to my mama’s ghost that I’m lower than dirt, it’s a deal. You want me to dig up the twelve girls I buried in the woods piece by piece, then just loan me a sliver of moonlight and a shovel, motherfucker. I ain’t going back, not deep inside, not her, not again.
And it ain’t all the crazy parallels going on, the carnival mirrors or whatever you might call them, so don’t even go there thinking I’m too stupid to notice them poking up out of the dark or that I have some native fear of tokens and omens and mystical signs. I can’t change the way the wind blows and I don’t think dancing on the street corner is gonna make the clouds weep. I don’t keep a rabbit’s foot, I don’t knock on wood, and I figured a long time ago that “theology” and all that other Godshit wasn’t nothing more than a bunch of folktales meant to fill up all the collection baskets.
So look at us real close, asshole, look at the real religion, two virgins, the dark priest and the erotic nun, both of us shamed for pouring our souls through the channels of a parent’s lust. We both walk the streets in warrior headdress, feathers and fur, war-paint and bone necklaces, the two of us making a foreground and background on both sides of the blur. My mask is “maintenance man,” the shadow in the shop, the faceless shape working on the compressor in the back corner of the warehouse. Hers is “materialistic girly-girl” with the rosebud lips and porcelain jaw, the doll with no eyes, the gem without substance.
And beneath all that? Well, pull up any big rock and you’ll either find a black hole crawling with vermin or a glowing treasure trove. Just don’t be so sure that the gleam of the diamond won’t blind you. Why the fuck do you think we’re both loners? I mean, anyone with half a brain would choose a bright burst of insight over my kind of darkness, but there ain’t anyone who wants to sit and play house with either deliverer, at least not long-term. Yeah. Best to keep behind you the bald naked sun and the shadow of the reaper, now ain’t it?
We’re both compulsive.
We both like to watch.
And in the end we wind up scaring the shit out of people, even the ones who might grow the brass balls to chuckle at the idea that I was a big guy in a little car and she was a small girl in a boat of a Mustang, that we both struggled to keep ourselves straight in the lane, that she had trouble parking and I couldn’t manage to change a flat or two when the shit hit the fan.
I’m not laughing, asshole. I told you, spook house parallels don’t mean shit unless you buy into shifty teachers, sweaty ministers, and the gossip of a bunch of withered old grandmammies cackling ’round a card table. I don’t believe in that shit, never did and never will, but that don’t change the fact that I can’t take being inside this dead bitch.
It hurts too much. The love between a man and a woman, from a woman’s point of view mind you, is like some dark persecution. I’m used to looking at life from deep in the pit, but at least from there you can see what the sky looks like. Love to Marissa Madison was like plummeting downward, hands over the head, wind whistling up her shirt, the rim of earth above her getting smaller and smaller until it became something she felt more than she saw, like a pinpoint of afterimage.
See, her pit is bottomless.
And the fucker who pushed her there was Jerome Anthony Franklin, branded on my brain now, a virus in the marrow. Hell ain’t flames and pitchforks, asshole.
It’s the scope and sweep of the fall.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
It happened last winter when Marissa Madison was on her way to AP twelfth-grade English class, heels clicking busily as if she were some administrator or government official, no backpack, large designer Rioni Hobo Carrier slung low on a hip, a copy of Macbeth in her hand. She was ten minutes late, but Mrs. Wallace would forgive her. The roster was mostly comprised of seventeen-year-old juniors who cut the class mercilessly, especially Dean Figgs and Veronica Simmons who had been no-shows for more than a week now, forging notes from the law academy teacher claiming they were helping prepare for the mock trial coming up next Thursday against Conestoga.
Of course, Marissa was just dying to show Mrs. Wallace how to put those two in their chairs and keep them there with some of their own intimate backstory for ammunition. She wanted to help security find a better way to keep all the girls from overcrowding the third-floor bathroom, and she’d come up with a number of ways to finally stop everyone from pranking on one another’s laptops by freezing the keyboards, but she couldn’t go around solving every discipline problem poking up like crabgrass around her, or straightening out every dispute, or worrying that people were always talking shit about her. That would be madness and her best defense was this face, these Gucci aviator sunglasses with bamboo detail, a French manicure, and the sassy little stride she’d perfected. Hamburger with that shake? You know it, girl.
She clicked on up past the gym and pool area, aggravated nonetheless. It was a long, excruciating battle, always trigger-killing the patchwork, throwing a wet blanket over her constant urge just to throw down and show people how to fix things. At the moment, she wanted to turn on her heel and run straight back down the hall to tell Ms. Pennypack, the principal’s administrative assistant with the wide hips and super-big tits (whom she had passed by the water fountain a few minutes before), to stop taking out student loans and going to night school for psychology. The woman just didn’t have the capacity for it, and she needed to see that it was all an attempt to follow a stern parental ideal ingrained in her from the earliest moments of childhood. Damn it! The woman was headed for a lifetime of vague unhappiness and gnawing disorientation in terms of her place in the world. So frustrating! Girlfriend would be much better off in beauty school, cutting hair. By forty she would have her own salon, but this was a “blue-collar” aspiration, so named by Ms. Pennypack herself as the heavy influence of her stoic father from beyond the grave still had her translating her dreams in terms of a rather distasteful cultural snobbery. And was Ms. Pennypack conflicted about this personal prejudice on at
least some subliminal level? Oh, yes, she was!
Marissa hadn’t the time to fix this, of course. She also had no right to go interpreting what was or was not appropriate in terms of someone’s position in the social matrix. Her own therapist was currently working with her on her strict responsibility to detour this very thing, and she had to focus!
Still, it would make a good book, or at least an interesting graph, wouldn’t it? Marissa strutted past the shop, thinking about following the money in relation to the societal perception created by one’s job over time. You would have to take into account the growth of cultural sensitivity, and the slow integration of neighborhoods, scholastics, and mass media, finally comparing all that with the level of tolerance for diversity morphed with an ever-shifting socioeconomic definition defined not only by wealth, but informational affluence in terms of the spread of data through electronic media with access growing at a certain rate as compared with the expertise of the techies. This could be calculated by figures and estimates, but the final tabulation had to be cross-referenced through the lens of new linguistic patterns running through the various media. What crazy math! Awesome ideas! More interesting than Macbeth anyway.
Marissa walked past the west stairwell and stopped cold.
Someone was in there rapping, barking out a bit of hiphop, using the echo. It was an awful rhyme really, some AA scheme with weak similes, but that voice! There was something in the tone that was deep and resonant, edged with a rich sort of anger that pierced her between the shoulder blades and ran straight down her spine. She backed up against the wall and dropped her bag on the floor, toes pointing in at each other, the left heel coming up a bit. She was softly biting the nail of her index finger, and then this young man’s past came up in her patchwork so hard she had to bite back a groan.
His name was Jerome Anthony Franklin, and he lived with his grandmother here in Broomall, in one of those shitty red-brick saltboxes they rented off West Chester Pike because the woman had saved enough money as a nurse’s aide at the Dunwoody retirement home over thirty years to actually live in the town where she worked. She’d bought a used car too, this Chevy Malibu from the stone ages, and even though they didn’t have much furniture in the house they had carpeting. Jerome missed his friends, and playing b-ball on the lighted courts up at 17th and Mount Vernon, and meeting everyone at the Crab Shack and goofing and then going over Cameron’s place with the guys playing Assassins Creed 4 all night. He missed busting on Kamari for having a lisp, on Abdul for having a big head, and Quad for his nappy fro. He missed dragging them all to the car shows every year and hearing time and again that he was the only city-niggah they’d ever met who liked Nascar and the Indy 500 as much as any Southern redneck, keeping pictures of hotrods in his cell phone, posting more of them on his Facebook page, and dreaming all his life about having the bread to go to an auction and buy a vintage 1970 Buick GSX, Stage 1, yellow with black racing stripes, or a white 1969 Camero Z28, and oh-my-God, he didn’t even have his license yet!
And now he was stuck trying his best to get used to the suburbs where you could hear crickets chirring even in the daytime. And while you lost the convenience of going to the store using your feet and a transpass (before you could afford your classy ride, of course), you got foliage. Lots of foliage. Lots of space, too much, and Jerome was lonely and too proud to say it, too closed off to make new acquaintances, too isolated with the minuscule demographic of African Americans here to feel he fit in even a little bit, and he was just going to walk tough, wear a face, keep to himself, do what he was supposed to.
But he’d never give up his dream of being a star, of being rich enough to buy ten hotrods, not for nobody, not even in the face of an absolute crushing failure like the cafeteria incident last year at the People First Charter School in downtown Philly.
Marissa sat down. Up until that moment the patchwork had been hard information, like reading some intricate personal journal, but the “cafeteria incident” at Jerome’s old high school came up in full visual. It was his beautiful plague, the thing that haunted him, defined him, gave him that razor’s edge and awesome personal storybook irony in that the baggage he dragged behind him would eventually become his chariot. He just couldn’t see it now for the life of him.
“I see it,” Marissa whispered, and she saw him, sitting in his classes in this strange institution where the boys wore blue pants, white shirts, and ties, and the girls had cross-ties and grandma skirts, where the hallways were too thin and the classrooms too small, where there were signs on the walls stating “Failure is not an option,” and kids snuck in breakfast sandwiches from the trucks out on Broad Street. They played cards in the bathrooms and went to class most of the time, they often talked during pre-class exercises and played too much, but if the teacher was good the conversation always wrapped back in to the lesson. It was a back-to-basics school, no sports, no recess, no gym, just a crowded circus where there was a lot of pushing and shoving and laughing and being stupid, and there were fights for real sometimes, but not nearly as many as there were in the neighborhood high schools like Overbrook, Franklin, and Germantown. No one was blowing up toilets or pushing burning pianos out the windows, bringing in guns or hiding bags of weed up in the drop ceiling, but every once in awhile there’d be a banner pulled down or a yellow industrial trash bin upended.
Jerome never thought he would miss it. He was one of the tougher kids, sitting in class with his shirt out, looking right back at the teacher with half-lidded eyes, mouthing back what looked like the lecture and constantly jotting stuff down in a ratty old notebook.
Of course, he was mouthing his hip-hop, writing raps, collecting one-liners and playing on phrases. Marissa sighed right there on the floor. The boy was beautiful the way statues were beautiful, smooth dark skin, close-cut hair, and a military jaw. He was five foot nine and muscular, pure polished granite, more the model for Burberry or Saks Fifth Avenue than the street-hardened rapper making noise on the corner. Many misunderstood him, assuming that when he curled his lip he was forming an expression of superiority or something. But it was really just the way he smiled, as if he knew the inside line on you but would lose a limb before telling. He was older than his seventeen years, handsome in a neighborhood where tough and cunning really counted for more, and insightful in a poetic and sensual way that was going to change the game in a manner he could never even begin to imagine.
And on his day of beautiful failure he was a junior, and he was going to old-school rap battle Adonis Baxter in the lunchroom, and everyone was talking about it since it meant more than street cred. This was war, less about winning but more about not losing, and being ready to spit back the harshest when the dude standing across from you went for your manhood, your flaws, your hesitation, your mother. This was no popularity contest. It was a way to weed out the weak and re-establish the food chain in colors you’d wear till you graduated.
Most everyone was betting on Jerome, and it was rumored that by the time the smoke cleared at least a grand was going to pass hands. Jerome was bigger and blacker, quiet tension under a dress shirt, wire-tight and dedicated. No one really could name a time they saw Adonis rapping at all, not even lip-synching the rhyme of a fav with his ear buds in. He had transferred this year from Central, and no one really knew too much about him except that he was a bit weird, quiet, small, light-skinned black, and still wearing his hair in braids even though that style hadn’t been cool since 2001. He was a bit knock-kneed too, shuffling through the halls like a shadow, always reading some kind of book instead of having his face buried in a cell phone like everybody else. He hadn’t made many friends, and he always sat in the back row or off to the side, evidently oblivious to the lively conversations around him.
Jerome was known for busting on people, talking his way out of trouble like a snake-oil salesman, hanging with three different crowds, goofing, making girls feel salty, pranking, imitating administrators, taking pictures of classmates who were dumb enough to fall asleep
in class and laughing so hard showing them around on his cell phone that he sometimes fell against the walls knocking papers off the corkboards. In return, he had to guard his own iPhone like a hawk, because if Eboni, Lisa, Khalliyah, or Shanice got a hold of it, they would literally fill it up with their own selfies all day.
And Adonis? He was known only for his note-taking and his penmanship, believe it or not. It was like artwork, calligraphy, and he did it with the paper turned three-quarters upsidedown no less. And if that parlor trick wasn’t clever enough, he also had some sort of deformity. His hands were curled in like crab claws, nasty! Many believed it was cerebral palsy or something like that, but he didn’t seem to have accommodations and he never went to tutoring. He just sat there in class taking notes in perfect longhand, breathing steadily through his wide nose, looking up at the teacher with small, flat, unreadable eyes.
And all this bothered Jerome. What was he going to rap about? He didn’t really have any dirt on this kid, and hadn’t had time to go gathering it. This showdown had sparked up from nowhere, some kind of rumor from a group of tenth-grade girls who wore Hijab veils and who claimed kids from Adonis’s old high school swore they knew a pocket of eleventh-graders here who had heard Adonis had called Jerome a simple-ass African retard with a black faggot face or something like that. By third period it had spread through the school like wildfire, and Jerome didn’t have the right notebooks with him for prep.
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